


D = V * T

by seabass



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 22:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15519822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seabass/pseuds/seabass
Summary: There are no monsters, mutants, or war. Robots do not stand as gladiators against the test of Man. Warriors do not drift together, close in thought and will and action.There’s just a hole in the desert. And it grows.





	D = V * T

There is no need for a biologist, but there Dr. Geiszler stands.

Hermann wears a dress shirt, buttoned to the top of a well knotted tie. Dr. Geiszler wears a pair of thick sunglasses and a cotton shirt he bought at the Area 51 gas station.

Dr. Geiszler says, “Yeah, that’s odd.”

Hermann says, “If we acquire a radius every twenty minutes, we can calculate the growth rate and extrapolate. We will determine exactly how long we have until this anomaly becomes a public hazard.”

And Dr. Geiszler says, “Did you try like, filling it up with rocks?”

..

It takes 45 minutes for Hermann to set up his books, his notes, and his step-by-step plan for the next ten days. He meets with his three chosen interns: impressive Stanford and MIT graduate students who promise clever insight and data before sunset. 

Hermann changes his shirt, he sweats through his necktie, and the desert sun beats through the small window of his office like a laser. He taps chalk onto his big boards until he runs out of room and the numbers flow as if off the pages of a Mozart symphony.

All the while the pesky gnat, with some seven PhDs, is outside pacing from rock to cactus to brittlebush snapping pictures with his camera phone. All the while, Dr. Geiszler dots sunscreen on his exposed arms and laughs uproariously at bad jokes that the soldiers on duty cannot escape. Without taking a hint or a note, Dr. Geiszler makes his obnoxious presence very known in an otherwise somber and serious quarantine zone.

Hermann clenches his teeth and snaps off the tip of his chalk.

..

Dr. Geiszler has printed a hundred blurry photos of animal droppings and empty holes within cactus arms. He has scattered these photos over his side of the office - snapping them to his whiteboard with magnets, tacking them to the wall, taping them over the window so the sun never reaches him at his desk even in the morning when Hermann is nearly blinded.

“I think we should go into the hole,” Dr. Geiszler says to his photos.

“And how do you suppose we do that.”

“Just get some really long rope.”

With the foot of his cane, Hermann pushes a picture of a dirty boulder across the red duct tape on the floor. He stands, sore and tired, on the edge of enemy lines and he frowns so deeply that Dr. Geiszler has no choice but to feel it burning into the back of his head. 

“You have been here for 24 hours, Doctor. Have you contributed anything to our campaign?”

“Other than my great sense of style and the comment card box in the cafeteria, I’m going to be the first person to climb into the hole in the desert.”

Hermann returns to his numbers and symbols. They would laugh with that man if they could, at Dr. Geiszler’s useless science and lack of hypothesis. True science, of course, is black and white. Right or wrong. Provable and refutable. It involves numerics and plans and lists.

..

One intern holds a camcorder, one holds a stopwatch, and one holds a clipboard. They stand around the hole in the desert floor, now spanning 3.045 meters across. When the red dot on the camcorder blinks on, Hermann introduces himself and the day and explains the tools on his fold out table and the math behind his experiment.

Colonel Pentecost and his Lieutenant stand out of the camera shot and listen.

Dr. Gieszler lounges on the steps to their office trailer and watches from the shade.

Hermann drops a flare down the hole first. He calculates the time it drops at shoulder height to the time it hits the bottom of the great hole. The camcorder and the interns and Hermann all lean in to watch the red flame plummet for three, four, five seconds. They wait for it to hit the bottom with the stopwatch clicking.

The flame blinks out of sight as it is swallowed.

An intern scratches notes on his clipboard and the camera flicks back to Hermann’s face and the furrow of his brow and the lengthy pause it takes for words to form.

“We have a minimum depth. That is good. That is plottable. Let’s get a measurement of the width as it deepens. We will drop an air horn into the hole to calculate the size of the cavern based off the time it takes for echoes to reach us. We will need absolute silence for this next test.”

Hermann has large machines that listen for noise deep within strata. He turns dials and flips switches until the big computers blink into life and draws long lines of silent earth on the measuring sheets. He strips a long cut of red duct tape off a roll and as the horn blares Hermann ties the button tight. The monitor whips up to document the noise.

With the camera rolling, Hermann drops the air horn from shoulder height and watches it disappear into the dark.

The monitor records the noise sink from existence until it drops to zero and they wait and wait and wait.

The intern with the clipboard takes notes.

The monitor clicks with the noise of Dr. Geiszler standing up and walking back into the office.

The red light on the camera blinks off and Hermann collects the recording.

..

Hermann watches his experiment on a fat, rolling television that the army stole from an Arizona elementary school. When the clip ends, he rewinds the tape and watches it again. Everytime he rewatches it he extracates new data, new thoughts, new tests that can take place.

An intern announces that the hole is 3.056 meters across as Dr. Geiszler races into the room to clear his desk. Four soldiers carry two large aquariums between them. They are set on Dr. Geiszler’s desk so there is no room left for taking notes or reading books.

Within the first tank is a rock and a white, wide snake with a big triangle head and a rock and sand to bury itself underneath. The second tank holds a barrel cactus, a boulder, and a lizard about the size of Hermann’s stapler. 

“Absolutely not,” Hermann says, “I want those gone. I want those out of here. If they are not gone soon they will be squashed under my boot my day’s end.”

“Don’t be afraid of them, they’re harmless.”

“That is not a rattlesnake, then?”

“Well, of course it’s a rattlesnake. And so long as you keep your hands out of the tank it’s completely harmless.”

Hermann snorts with anger and disdain.

“Hermann, meet Rum Dum and Fairbanks. They don’t pay rent, but they keep to themselves and they are very quiet.”

“Are they going to help with the hole?”

“Help? My friend, they are single-handedly going to fix the hole. Well, Fairbanks doesn’t have any hands, but you get what I mean.”

“Truly and honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.”

..

Hours after Dr. Geiszler falls into a quiet work ethic at his desk chair, his nasty reptile friends slink and knockaround against the glass of their prisons. Like nails on a chalkboard, Rum Dum scratches against the glass from sunset until sunrise.

Hermann turns the volume up on his TV.

..

Colonel Pentecost is less than happy with the price, but Hermann debates his way to a rented tractor used by a nearby mining company for wireframe conveyance. He stands beside the truck as it rumbles to life. It drills within a meter of the hole, for half an hour, until the tractor overheats. 

Dr. Geiszler sneaks dirt samples from different sections of the drill and from the mouth of the hole.

Hermann tries not to kick him out of the way as he proudly announces to the colonel that, after several drilling attempts, it is reasonable to conclude that the hole does not stretch off in any direction, but drops steeply and completely straight down.

Pentecost does not seem impressed nor relieved by the news.

Hermann returns, belittled, to his hot office where two reptiles thrash around and eyeball him.

..

Dr. Geiszler falls asleep in front of a pile of dirt mounted on his microscope and a notation of question marks around the letter C. 

It is hot well into the night and Hermann loosens his tie just a bit as he limps to Dr. Geiszler’s side. He bangs his cane against the desk. With ink and dirt on his face, Dr. Geiszler blinks owlishly from behind his glasses and Hermann herds him off his chair and onto the couch on Hermann’s side of the red tape.

“You are a fool, Dr. Geiszler. You have not collected a single shred of productive evidence since you arrived. You have only taken selfies in the desert and played with animals. Did you think someone would not notice?”

Dr. Geiszler pulls the neatly folded blanket off the back of Hermann’s couch. It is a rich and thick wool brought overseas from Scotland and it is too warm for the desert and too expensive of a material to be laying on Dr. Geiszler’s dirty boots and sweaty shirt. 

Hermann unfolds it and lays it over Dr. Geiszler, so it covers him better.

..

After the third day of the reptiles and their constant, sleepless racket, Hermann finally snaps.

He winds himself with an internalized rant about the no pet policy of the army, of the contract he signed promising a non-hostile work environment, and of his right as a scientist to peace and quiet but before he unwinds into a storm, Dr. Geiszler slams to his feet.

He says, “It is odd, isn’t it!”

“Quite odd,” Hermann agrees.

“They are moving a lot.”

“And making a lot of noise.”

“Scratching on the glass.”

“All night long!”

“They’re not eating.”

“Less important than noise, I believe.”

“They’re not following their custom habit.”

“We’re veering from the problem, Doctor.”

“Rum Dum won’t stay on his boulder. He has been circling his space for days without once perching. Fairbanks hasn't hidden under the rock. They’re anxious.”

“Because they want to be set free,” Hermann states.

“Because they feel threatened,” Dr Geiszler unhinges the tank and lifts the lizard’s shaking, anxious body out by a solid hold.

Dr. Geiszler leaves with his lizard and Hermann continues his calculations.

The hole now spans 3.266 meters.

..

Hermann reads the reports from his interns and they tell him nothing new.

He has no depth to report.

He has no proper sizing.

He cannot tell Pentecost or the world whether the hole is deep or if it is catastrophic. He cannot determine its origins, its cause, its destination.

He knows that it grows by 0.013 meters an hour.

He knows that it will take months before it reaches civilization.

He knows that it is incomprehensible, and therefore unpredictable.

He knows that today, five days into collecting his data, an hour passes and the hole grows 0.0015 meters.

But, Dr. Geiszler continues to play with his lizard and his dirt.

..

Before the sun rises on the sixth day, Hermann is shaken awake by a Staff Sergeant Mori. Hermann is rubbing his eyes, he is in slippers and pajama pants, he is still sweating through the Arizona summer, and he is dragged, half awake, out of bed.

He mutters and groans until Mori pushes him down the steps of his trailer. Pentecost is already barking, soldiers are crowding against him with questions, Dr Geiszler, too, walks at his side with endless loud thoughts as the blaring noise of an air horn overwhelms him.

He stops at the lip of the hole and the talking ceases as they all look down.

Hermann has no answers to voice. He stands with the rest of them, bewildered and speechless.

The air horn drowns the desert with noise until Dr. Geiszler jumps into the two meter deep hole and peels the duct tape off the little can. They plunge into silence.

The hole does not reach to his chest and his boots drag through real dirt at the very solid bottom.

Dr. Geiszler reaches down to pick up the flare, which still burns bright in the dusk.

..

“Perhaps it’s a practical joke,” Hermann turns the burned out flare over in his hands, “Or an optical illusion.”

“We should fill it with concrete.”

“At least we can rule out a black hole in the center of the Earth.”

“Was that really on your list of possibilities?”

“Of course not,” Hermann crosses ‘black hole’ out of his little, yellow notepad.

“It’s like an episode of Twilight Zone.”

“Or a paradox from Zeno’s ancient philosophy.”

“Or like a bad acid trip.”

“Do you have any theories, Doctor? Or is your brain mush after years of drug abuse?”

“I want to go in that hole.”

“You went in the hole this morning.”

“When it’s deep.”

“Hopefully it will never be deep again.”

“The dirt is missing trace elements around the edge that are present in the soil further away. Well, it’s not missing, just depleted.”

“What do you mean?”

“The dirt from your drill had all the elements you would expect to find in the desert. The dirt around the lip of the hole has them in just… smaller quantities.”

“Explain.”

“I can’t just explain it.”

“Hypothesize.”

“Okay, so you know fairy rings you see in the forest? That perfect circle of mushrooms that everyone has some superstitious explanation for? Well, what we know is that beneath the soil of a fairy ring is a big fungus and the mushrooms you see sprouting at the top are the fruiting bodies it uses to reproduce. Everytime it goes through it’s reproductive cycle, the ring has to grow further out from the body because the last cycle has absorbed the nutrients in the soil.”

“You think the hole is an entity? Depleting the soil of resources? Like a fungus?”

“It’s just a theory.”

“And why would all the dirt come back?:

“See, I don’t have an answer for that yet. Hey smartass, what’s your great theory?”

“An old mining cave collapsed deep underneath us and flooded again, bringing the soil back to the surface.”

“Flooded? With what water? This is a desert. In July.”

“How is water in the desert more outrageous than an invisible entity eating our dirt?”

“Alright, let me get back to you on that one. It’s not because you won the argument, let me emphasize, but I’m just tired and need time to think because I had to wake up super early on account of someone dropping an air horn down a magic growing hole in the floor and somehow it came back still with air in it two days later.”

“Of course.”

“Why was the flare still lit with all that water, Hermann! How’s the flood theory panning out now, Herm.’”

..

Hermann pops a fine, old bottle of wine when an intern announces the hole to have dropped to an indiscernible depth and to have grown to 1.003 meters in width.

“To staying in the job,” Dr. Geiszler click his glass to Hermann’s.

“To, perhaps, the end of the world.”

“Grim, I love it,” Dr. Geiszler sips and grimaces, “This is disgusting. Did you get this at Walmart?”

“It was a very expensive gift from my mother after I graduated with my second PhD. It is from Italy, and bottled in the late 1800s. It cost almost as much as our summer home.”

“It tastes just like the what I bulk buy from Costco when I want to get wine drunk. It costs like six bucks for a box.”

“I hope this hole swallows us.”

..

Hermann stands outside the Colonel’s door with his folders after Dr. Geiszler enters the ring to defend his current fieldwork. Two minutes have yet to pass before Lieutenant Hansen props open the door and asks Hermann for his input.

Dr. Geiszler stands in front of Pentecost’s regal desk and a phone on speaker that buzzes with a busy line.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Pentecost greets

“Sir, I have my research.”

“Does it tell us anything?”

“Nothing finite, but I am working on an equation to predict the changes in the hole.”

Pentecost sits back in his seat.

The phone crackles with distance and bad desert reception, “We need information, Colonel.”

“We need to go into the hole,” Dr. Geiszler says.

Pentecost waves him off, “I want more.”

“And I’ll get you more. From inside the hole.”

“You cannot crawl into that hole,” Hermann sneers, “It is unpredictable, it behaves erratically. It has closed up before and it may do it again while someone is in there.”

“It only did that once,” Dr. Geiszler says, “and everything we threw down there was brought right back up to the top.”

“We have not sent anything living down there.”

“And I would love to be the first.”

“You are a ridiculous and reckless man! Do you think you're brave? Do you think anyone will thank you?”

“Buddy, I just want to poke around for a bit.”

Hermann cannot help but raise his voice, to pierce that thick skull with power if not reason, “You are going to kill yourself!”

“You can’t tell us anything about the hole for certain except that I will definitely die if I go in there? Fishy.”

“You will burden us all with a needless death for the sake of your Frankenstein science!”

“Science is about taking risks.”

“Science is about creation not decay!”

“Uh, half-lifes. That’s the science of decay right there. God, you're pretentious. I bet your lab partners back in undergrad wanted to kill you for your sig fig policy.”

“Enough,” Pentecost snaps, “You are both telling me that with a dozen degrees between you, three interns, and a week, you have come up with absolutely nothing?”

“I have the beginnings of a structured logarithm.”

“Great.”

“Colonel,” Dr. Geiszler says, “I have studied animal behavior for years. My final thesis was on the Sonoran desert ecology. Months of my personal research went into these niches and that's why I’m here. Trust me when I say that the animals around here are acting strange.”

Hermann mutters, “Good grief.”

“Chuckwallas are very territorial. They pick one boulder to spend years sunbathing, eating, and mating. They aren’t tempted to leave during droughts or food shortages. Nothing short of a natural disaster would make them leave.”

“So?” 

“So, there are traces of dozens of these lizards having been here two weeks ago and now there are none. There are no snakes or scorpions under the rocks, no wrens in their nests, and no hares. The crickets have stopped chirping.”

Pentecost darkens as Dr. Geiszler speaks. 

Hermann thinks of Rum Dum and Fairbanks spinning circles in their cages, of the hundreds of photos of evidence of animal life spread across their office. He cannot recall one shot with an animal among them.

“When I got here there were no animals within 50 feet of the hole. Now, I’m reaching to find one within a quarter mile.”

“They’re running,” Hermann blanches.

“We need to go into that hole and pull something tangible out now because I think whatever’s happening is about to get a lot worse.”

Silent and cryptid, Pentecost looks between the two scientists. He looks down at Dr. Geiszler’s reports and scrawled margin notes.

“We’ll send you in with a team in an hour.”

Hermann sets his packets of trusted numbers on Pentecost’s desk and he leaves as quickly as he can.

..

“Dr. Geiszler, you are a fool.”

“I keep telling you to call me Newt.”

Hermann is sore from his left knee to the center if his chest. He takes a seat at his desk as soon as he enters the office. Dr. Geiszler fills his backpack with notebook, pens, vials, tubes, tools.

“Let me finish my equation before you jump into that death trap. We will know when or if it will close again.”

“I’m not going to jump, I’m going to scaffle. You have an hour to figure it all out, you heard the colonel.”

“I need two days.”

“If I don’t come back, Rum Dum needs his water changed and Fairbanks eats every other Wednesday.”

“Two days, Dr. Geiszler! Are you so impatient!”

All his erratic, senseless movements are emphasized in his seconds of stillness as Dr. Geiszler says, “Impatient? Yeah. But also, I kinda want to save the world today.”

“Can you wait?”

“I can. But I won’t.”

“Good riddance, then”

Hermann rubs at the deep ache in his chest.

..

Two soldiers forerun the dive into the hole and Dr. Geiszler follows. They wear hard helmets, neon vests, and belts for scaling down tall mountains. Their harnesses are wired through with thick, well-fastened rope. Hermann triple checks the tethers before they drop and he keeps a vice hold to one rope in case the knot unwinds or the other end suddenly slackens.

At 0800 Dr. Geiszler flashes a toothy, unbearable smile as he steps off the lip. Hermann watches the top of his head zip out of existence. 

The sunrise is much more bearable to watch as the minutes tick. The sky offers pink and purple and blue and no lifeless black, no endless abyss. 

After half an hour, Pentecost pulls away from the watching crowd and speaks softly with a handful of sergeants and captains. Lieutenant Hansen itches nervously at the fold of his neckline at the edge of the hole. 

“We lost contact with them.”

Hermann looks up at Staff Sergeant Mori.

“Their radio does not work in the hole.”

Hermann tightens his grip on the rope.

..

The team does not appear until most of the soldiers have trickled off to a late lunch. Hermann, Pentecost, Mori, and Lieutenant Hansen stay to watch the hole and as the first head and arm appear they help lift the tired men from the edge of the abyss.

Lieutenant Hansen kneels by his son with a bottle of water, Mori helps Private Becket to his feet, and Hermann snaps the belt and rope off of Dr. Geiszler before he physically drags him as many inches from the hole as he can. 

Hermann pushes hair from Dr. Geiszler's faces and cleans off his dusty glasses. He checks his pulse and the movement of his eyes and the twitch of his lips as he smiles.

“You are a fool, Dr. Geiszler.”

Geiszler croaks, “I can live with that.”

“What did you see,” Pentecost interrupts.

“No much. It’s very dark, but it goes straight down. The hole doesn’t narrow or widen at any point.The measurements were so exact, it has to be man made.”

Dr. Geiszler passes his notes to Hermann. His handwriting is thin and barely legible, but there are certainly numbers.

“Did you reach the bottom?”

“No.”

“You were climbing the whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“You climbed downward for five hours and you never found the bottom?”

“What?”

“Sir,” Becket interrupts, “We were only down there for 45 minutes.”

“It is well after noon.”

“We were watching the clock,” Staff Sergeant Hansen says.

Hansen holds his stopwatch out to Hermann as it blinks into its 48th minute.

“You must have reset it,” Hermann declares.

Dr. Geiszler snaps his off his neck, “Except mine reads the same thing.”

“And mine,” says Becket.

..

“You’re mad at me.”

“I am not angry with you, Dr Geiszler.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I am not.”

“Yes, you-”

“I am!”

“I knew it!”

“You did not consult with me before you went into the unknown! I am on the brink of very valuable information and you did not think my work was worth the wait.”

“Hermann,” Dr Geiszler says from across the lab, “I just really wanted to jump into that hole.”

Hermann sits at his desk. He sets his cane against his piles of paper and looks across the midnight dark of the office. Dr. Geiszler is shrouded in shadow and the small beam of his lamp. He is watching Hermann, something sincere in his eyes.

“You are thoughtless and easily excitable.”

“You're boring and your tie is crooked.”

Preferring the simplicity of bed, Hermann stands and he leaves.

..

One intern flies home the same day the other two tell him the hole spans 4.500 meters. The two remaining interns hover tensely as Hermann plots and stews and thinks until the buzz of their unspoken questions deafens Hermann to the language of math. When Hermann snaps, both students jump.

“We were just worried,” Says one.

“We were just thinking,” Says the other.

“Spit it out!”

“Is it safe to be here?”

Hermann looks away from their faces - their youth and their fear - back to his decimal place which stands prominently in a dimension without such worries.

“Certainly,” Hermann says.

He’s not lying; he’s extrapolating.

..

Pentecost visits the lab after breakfast and he politely waits until Hermann clicks his chalk down to speak.

“Update me.”

“I have finished an equation that very well may predict the next sequences the hole presents.”

Dr. Geiszler huffs from his chair. He has dirt and ink on his face and he is elbows-deep in the workings of an elementary school science project.

He says, “You’re wasting your time. You can’t possibly have enough data to come up with a prediction. We need to go back in the hole.”

Hermann smacks his cane on the whiteboard at the corner of his sigma and a long, drawn out division, “You could not possibly have the intellectual drive to understand the concept of true mathematics, then.”

“One of my degrees is in math.”

“One can perceive a flame and never conceive a spark.”

“Half of that equation is high school algebra. If you’re comparing math to fire, that’s off the tip of a matchstick.”

Hermann huffs, “Then give it a try and see if you get burned.”

Dr. Geiszler grins big - dimples like the craters in the moon.

Pentecost steps between them and closer, “Update me.”

Hermann follows the equation down, “It is almost certain the hole will shrink again before it continues to grow. It will switch between shrinking and growing for three more days before it takes one of two paths.”

“Which are?”

“It is entirely possible the hole will shrink enough that it will collapse in on itself and disappear on its own. In which case, we will never truly understand why it occurred or where it came from, but it will no longer exist.”

“And the second path?”

“On the fourth day, the hole will no longer shrink. It will begin to grow at an exponential rate until it is growing faster than we can move.”

“Where will it stop?”

“I do not have any evidence to support that it will ever stop.”

“How likely is the first path?”

“Nine time out of ten, the hole will take the second path.”

Pentecost glances to Dr. Geiszler, but he looks to Hermann again when he asks, “How do we lean these statistics in our favor?”

“We understand it.”

Dr. Geiszler says, “We go back in.”

..

“I should go with you this time,” Hermann says.

Dr. Geiszler looks up at Hermann for a second and, peculiarly enough, he says, “Great idea. I think I’ll collect samples from the walls. Do you think I should bring Rum Dum or do you think that will be too hard on him?”

“I think,” Hermann swallows, “Dr. Geiszler, did you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I should go with you down into the hole.”

“Great idea. What about the lizard?”

“If you think you will learn anything from it, bring the lizard.”

Dr. Geiszler scratches pen to paper. 

“You think it’s a good idea that I go?”

Dr. Geiszler looks up, hair a mess and glasses askew. He has a look on his face like he doesn't get it, and it takes a second longer before it all clicks together. Hermann taps his cane on the floor and clenches his jaw and he lets Dr. Geiszler take all the time he needs to form his words.

“With a few adjustments, I can make sure your harness won’t put weight on your leg. I can make a strap so you can get to your cane easily. Let me sketch out a couple ideas.”

Hermann crosses the red tape to lean against the desk and criticize Dr. Geiszler’s blueprints and ideas.

..

Hermann sits at the edge of the hole after the soldiers and Dr. Geiszler have made the leap. They hover between clumps of cool clay a few meters from the mouth and a vast Nothing looms beneath Hermann. Flashlights and sunlight don’t eat past even a layer of the hole and the black. Hermann’s feet dangle into the dark, already almost lost to the heaving movement of lightlessness, and inner-Hermann begs to draw back, to retreat, to pull his toes back under the cover before the monsters can tell that he’s exposed. 

If Hermann were to crack a glowstick, and he were to shake it until the green spread even, it would drop inches past his feet before it would be snagged by some awful creature of the dark, something that would turn his stomach and wheeze and pull him slowly, strongly, to the lip and down, down down.

Dr. Geiszler cups Hermann’s ankle. 

Patience is such an alien concept for Hermann to apply to Dr. Geiszler. It belongs less in his dimples than it does in the Hole.

“It’s an awfully long fall,” Hermann says.

“You might starve before the fall kills you.”

“Is that your bedside manner?”

Hermann pushes off the lip and holds his breath until his ropes catch him. Dr. Geiszler inches down and Hermann follows.

Each step is deliberate and small. Hermann never completely lifts his feet off the wall, he keeps his knees bent and his heels up. Knuckles white and shaking on his lead rope and his buckle, he grinds centimeter by centimeter. He stares only directly forward at the formless copper clay and the rocks that never change. 

The sun is a pin eye above them in far too short a time. Hermann snaps to find Dr. Geiszler right behind him, glowing under flashlight.

“Are you okay?”

“I lost track of time.”

“It’s been about twenty minutes.”

“Down here, at least.”

Below him, Dr. Geiszler adjusts his glasses and the darkness gapes. With the blackness comes a bone-deep cold.

“Where are the soldiers?”

Dr. Geiszler looks down, and the beam of his lamp is devoured, “They’re down there somewhere.”

“It’s not as if they could get lost.”

“I think there’s something here.”

“Where?”

“Right here, under my finger tips.”

Hermann steps to the right and lower, down until he is shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Geiszler. He sees dirt under Dr. Geiszler’s palm, and clay between his knuckles. 

“There’s nothing.”

“Feel it.”

Hermann replaces Dr. Geiszler’s hand with his own. The wall is cold and moist. Rubble crumbles from his touch. His fingers draw over the rocks and then the change.

“Oh.”

A ledge, no wider than the edge of a penny, is platformed around the circumference of the hole. Hermann stretches to follow it across, behind, back again.

“What’s that for? That has to be man made.”

Hermann wears at the edge of the ledge, “It is a clean cut.”

“The hole is fractionally smaller.”

“Your voice,” Hermann whispers, “is echoing.”

“Hermann, is that the bottom?”

Not five meters below their feet, Hermann squints and sees boulders and rocks and a flat surface. He hesitates, the numbers in his head roll around in a wary thunder, and he grasps his harness as every bone in his body screams for logic, for sanity, and to touch anything but that floor.

Dr. Geiszler propels himself downward, landing in the dust.

“We should go back,” Hermann warns. 

His voice echoes back.

“There’s a tunnel. It’s sloped downward.”

“Dr. Geiszler, if you disappear down that tunnel I will leave you here.”

Dr. Geiszler crouches. His eyes and the curve of his jaw and the line of his shoulders are lost in the dark. His flashlight bobs toward the tunnel - toward the monstrous mouth, toward the itchy black that diffuses into Hermann’s pores. There is an eerie feeling of lost before gone.

Hermann says, “Dr. Geiszler, do not go in there.”

“Whatever the animals are running from, I feel it now,” Dr. Geiszler laughs, “I have goosebumps.”

His light inches further away.

“Dr. Geiszler, please! Newton, come back.”

“We came down here to learn about the hole.”

“I’ve learned enough.”

..

The soldiers are back before them. 

Hermann’s head spins until he is dizzy. There will never be enough chalkboards to explain it.

He throws up in his room. He sits by the trash can for hours and he wakes up on the floor later with his leg stiff and back aching. It’s night and the desert is silent. There is a suffocating void that crickets and owls should buffer.

Slipping his fingers between the blinds, Hermann peaks on the hole. It looks no bigger, darker, or worse, but Hermann’s heart skips a beat like it knows something will crawl out of it. Hermann hides beside his bed with pen and paper, but for the rest of the night his paper stays blank.

..

His last two interns ask him what he saw down there, why he is so ashen white. When Hermann does not answer, they ask him if they are safe. When he does not answer, they pack and leave.

..

Pentecost waits for Hermann’s report, and he will wait a little longer.

Herman hikes up the short staircase to Dr. Geiszler’s door. Dr. Geiszler has it opened before he’s on the top step. The little room is overwhelming - with sketches and notepads and book after book after book. There are specimens in the room, some dried, some wax-coated, some fresh.

It is a mark of an intelligent mind, to be so delved into work, maybe.

It is an organized chaos, maybe.

Dr. Geiszler offers him a seat at his desk by spinning the chair around to face the bed.

Hermann sits and he says, “Supposedly, no news is good news. I hope that is true, because I have no news for the army except that I do not know what to do.”

Dr. Geiszler falls on the end of his bed. He lifts his glasses.

He says, “You and me both.”

“What would we do if the world were to end.”

“Get some good food. Watch the sunset.”

“That is what you would do with your last days?”

“I want to try that chicken joint up the road. I want another tattoo. That’s about it.”

“I want to watch a symphony in Paris. I want to eat a grand, authentic Italian meal. I want to walk through Greece and visit the museums in Rome. I want to watch the sunrise on a sailboat off the coast of Spain.”

Dr. Geiszler says, “I could cook you some spaghetti.”

It is the genuine offer, the soft look in his eyes - it is the way he smiles, just a twinge, that sets Hermann to laughing. It is a small, relief of a laugh.

“I could agree to that,” Hermann admits.

“Spaghetti and one last sunset it is.”

..

Dinner is made tense by the end of the world.

Hermann and Newt sit on the hatch of army trucks well after they lose their appetites. 

Constellations make Hermann feel small and he points them out - traces their dim lines and recites the distance of Gemini. Newt pretends he does not already know and Hermann is grateful.

Stormcloud-impending and meters away, the Hole grows.

..

They pass ideas and critiques over the duct tape that splits the lab. Hermann tosses scattered papers and gibberish equations on the floor until the tape is covered.

Their messes blur together into the anarchy of a thirty hour day.

Two of the most brilliant and contrasting brains on the continent blur from dawn until dusk until dawn again. 

They come up with nothing.

..

Hermann wakes up and maybe an hour has passed to a profitless sleep. He had sat down on his couch for a second that turned the clock to noon. Newt works at his desk - pencil to paper and nose in a book. He blinks slow, he holds his head, he glances up to see Hermann awake and he smiles.

Lieutenant Hansen knocks on their door. 

As he walks in, he says, “Gentlemen.”

Hermann sits up, pushes the blanket off his lap, stands to match the lieutenant’s tension with mirrored rigged jaw and taut shoulders.

Newt sits back, “What’s up?”

“The hole is gone.”

“Like, completely gone?”

“Overnight?”

“It has shrunk down to the same radius as a pencil. It’s no bigger than a dime.”

“Like Hermann predicted,” Newt whispers.

Newt’s voice is lost with pride.

Hermann turns to his chalkboard, his art, the numbers and symbols. They are solid like stone and now etched into the fabric of the universe. Like the truth of the distance formula, it now speaks for an essence of life - it holds a greater meaning.

Through Hermann, they speak a certainty that English and German and Greek never will.

Hermann pushes past the lieutenant.

He fights his way down the few stairs, past the soldiers that gather, past Pentecost and his frown, to the hole in the ground and the unpredictability that Hermann has tamed.

Snapping his tape from his breast pocket, Hermann gently kneels to measure the Hole.

0.100 cm.

Twenty minutes later, he measures it again.

0.100 cm.

..

Days pass and the hole does not grow.

And then the crickets chirp.

..

“Now that the world is ambiguously saved, maybe it’s time to start acting like it’s ending.”

Hermann says, “What do you mean?”

And Newt says, “There’s still science in Spain.”

“And sailboats,” Hermann agrees.

“And sunsets.”

“And no menacing hole in the dirt.”

“But wouldn’t it be cool if there was?”


End file.
